Since March 2024, Google has fundamentally changed the way it evaluates a website’s responsiveness. This technical change, which has gone relatively unnoticed in general guides, redefines what it means to “optimize your SEO” today. SEO practices that worked two years ago are no longer sufficient: natural referencing in 2024 relies on more nuanced, demanding, and sometimes counterintuitive signals.
Interaction to Next Paint: the SEO metric that changes the game in 2024
On March 12, 2024, Google replaced the First Input Delay (FID) with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) in the Core Web Vitals. The difference is not cosmetic. FID only measured the delay of the first user interaction on a page. INP evaluates the responsiveness of all interactions, from the first click to the last filter activated.
In practical terms, an e-commerce site whose product page loads quickly but whose sorting filters respond with a slight delay now sees its score penalized. Sites with high interactivity (dynamic forms, nested menus, single-page applications) are the most exposed.
The recommended threshold for INP was initially set at 200 ms. Several analyses published in 2026 indicate that this threshold has dropped to 150 ms, which further tightens the requirement. Developers who were content to optimize initial loading times must now audit every JavaScript interaction throughout the entire user journey.
To delve deeper into the technical aspects of SEO and keep up with these developments, the information from www.geeknetwork.fr details the various components of an updated SEO strategy.
Useful content and the Helpful Content system: what Google really penalizes
Google’s Helpful Content system, integrated directly into the main algorithm since March 2024, does not just reward “good content.” It applies a negative signal across the entire site when it detects a significant proportion of pages deemed unhelpful.
A site that publishes fifty generic articles to cover as many queries as possible risks seeing all of its pages downgraded, including those that provide real value. The negative signal applies to the domain, not to isolated pages.
This mechanism encourages a trade-off that few guides address directly: it is better to remove or deindex weak content rather than keep it out of habit. Field reports vary on the recovery time after a content cleanup, but the principle remains documented by Google: reducing the share of low-value pages improves the overall signal of the domain.
The core update of April 2024 reinforced this logic by specifically targeting content produced at scale by AI without editorial oversight. Pages that rephrase search results without providing original expertise lose visibility in favor of content written by identifiable authors.
AI Overviews and SEO visibility: the impact of zero-click results
AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience) are changing the very structure of Google search results pages. By displaying a synthetic answer directly in the SERP, this feature reduces the number of clicks to source sites.
For simple informational queries (“SEO definition,” “what is a backlink”), an increasing share of searches no longer generates any outgoing clicks. The available data does not allow for precise quantification of this phenomenon across each sector, but the trend is documented by several search observatories.
The adaptation strategies emerging rely on two axes:
- Targeting queries with transactional or comparative intent, less likely to be fully satisfied by an AI summary in the SERP
- Structuring content to appear as a cited source in AI Overviews, using direct answers, proprietary data, and appropriate schema.org markup
- Strengthening brand awareness so that users directly search for the site name, thereby bypassing the layer of AI-generated results
This evolution does not render SEO obsolete. Instead, it shifts the value from raw traffic to the quality of the position held in the results.
E-E-A-T signals and proof of expertise: beyond statements
The E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is not a direct algorithmic ranking factor. Google presents it as a guide for its human evaluators (quality raters), whose feedback informs the training of ranking systems.
The nuance matters. Adding an author biography to a page does not mechanically trigger a positioning boost. What makes the difference is the consistency between the published content and verifiable proof of expertise: publications on other recognized sites, mentions in specialized press, referenced professional profiles.
YMYL (Your Money Your Life) sites, which deal with health, finance, or safety, are subject to a higher level of scrutiny. For other sectors, the first E (Experience) is becoming increasingly important: Google looks for signals indicating that the author has direct experience with the subject matter, not just the ability to compile sources.
Concrete elements that strengthen these signals:
- Detailed author pages with links to verifiable profiles (LinkedIn, academic publications, portfolios)
- A coherent internal linking structure connecting articles by the same author on their area of expertise
- Content regularly updated with a visible mention of the last revision date
- Citations or proprietary data absent from competitors
Optimizing online visibility in 2024 is no longer just a technical checklist. The replacement of FID with INP, the tightening of the Helpful Content system, the rise of AI Overviews, and the growing importance of proof of expertise shape a natural referencing landscape where depth takes precedence over volume. Each published page must justify its existence with measurable value; otherwise, it weighs against the domain rather than for it.
